<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
<meta charset="UTF-8">
<title>Headache without Rain, Fire without Pain by CuttlefishKitch</title>
<style type="text/css">

body { background-color: #ffffff; }
.CI {
text-align:center;
margin-top:0px;
margin-bottom:0px;
padding:0px;
}
.center   {text-align: center;}
.cover    {text-align: center;}
.full     {width: 100%; }
.quarter  {width: 25%; }
.smcap    {font-variant: small-caps;}
.u        {text-decoration: underline;}
.bold     {font-weight: bold;}
</style>
</head>
<body>
<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/23529532">Headache without Rain, Fire without Pain</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/CuttlefishKitch/pseuds/CuttlefishKitch'>CuttlefishKitch</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Series:</b></td><td>TMA Disability Fics [1]</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>The Magnus Archives (Podcast)</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Abuse, Chronic Pain, Current Adult Abuse, Disabled Character, Disabled Gerard Keay, EDS Gerard Keay, EDS Gerry, EDs, Ehlers-Danlos syndrome, Gen, Mary Keay's A+ Parenting (BIGGEST SARCASM POSSIBLE), Migrane, POTS Gerard Keay, POTS Gerry, Past Child Abuse, Postural Orthostatic Tachycardia Syndrome, neuralgia headache, poor gerry, pots - Freeform</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-04-07</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-04-07</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-01 15:21:47</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Teen And Up Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>No Archive Warnings Apply</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>1,621</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/23529532</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/CuttlefishKitch/pseuds/CuttlefishKitch</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>Gerard loses a day to a terrible headache, and Mary is not happy about it.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Series:</b></td><td>TMA Disability Fics [1]</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Series URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/series/1693270</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>10</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>65</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>Headache without Rain, Fire without Pain</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>Seriously though, Mary Keay warning, even if this is set right before Gerry escapes her.</p>
    </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>    The first thing Gerard does upon waking up is peer out the window. He’s more than a little surprised to see the sun staring back down at him from its late morning perch in the clear blue sky. Usually when he woke to this kind of sharp ache in his back lancing up into his head it meant rain. He heaves a pained sigh before slowly pulling himself into a standing position. His mother isn’t out yet so he still has a few precious moments to himself in the quiet flat above Pinhole Books.</p><p>    Puttering about his morning routine doesn’t ease the pain or shove it to the back of his awareness like he hoped it would. Nevertheless he manages to choke down some salted eggs and his traditional quart of water despite the nausea. The dry heaves, from caffeinated tea poured into an already complaining stomach, follow him into the shower, but eventually they settle into nothing more than rolling discomfort. The hot water manages to chase away some of the soreness from his back, and for that he's thankful. It does nothing for his head though, and actively conspires with his heart to lay him flat again as soon as he's finished in the bathroom.</p><p>    Crawling back into bed feels more like defeat than comfort, but the angry hummingbird in his chest and spinning cotton fuzz blackness in his head and vision means he has no other choice. He thinks laying down helps his head, and once the jackhammer dizziness fades and he tries to rise again only to be met with the feeling of a mallet-head blooming at the base of his skull he confirms it. Today was just going to be a bed day it seems. He probably would have slept til evening had he not been interrupted.</p><p>    “Gerard!” the ever familiar grating voice of his mother calls through the door. The same door she’s banging on repeatedly. “Get up! We have work to do. Don’t you dare sleep the day away again! Arse lazy bell-end you are!” Every sharp word and loud knock sends a new spike of pain skittering angrily across his brain. All he can do is groan in pain and squish a pillow over his ear to try and block out the agonizing noises. He knows it won’t work for long. There’s no way she’d let him off that easy.</p><p>    Sure enough Mary gets tired of waiting and she’s in his room despite the useless lock he always fastened remaining undisturbed. He doesn’t need to see her to know she’s there, he long ago learned how to feel the anger radiating off her. Right now though he can’t even be bothered to cower away from it, the pain in his head is too great. Maybe she’ll see that and have mercy. Maybe today he’s suffering enough without her help and she’ll leave him to his misery.</p><p>Maybe -</p><p>    No. Of course not. Her hand burrows under the pillow and fists into his hair, dragging him up to look her in the face. He winces from the rough yank and the panic of being grabbed like that builds in the back of his throat, bringing its best friends bile and shortened breaths with it. But the worst part isn’t the panic or the pain or the sinking fear that always comes with looking his mother in the eye. No, the worst part is her taking the weight of his skull off his spine eases the agony of the headache, and for a split second he’s grateful for the relief. </p><p>    But a moment of gratitude barely holds a nearly burned out wick to a childhood of hatred, so he uses the brief instance of clarity to bundle up the pain and anger into two searing embers behind his eyes and fix Mary with a white-hot burning stare. Her lip crinckles in disgust. Gerard likes to think he sees her stifle a shudder, but even if that’s not it she drops his head back onto his pillow and storms out in disappointment. He curls in on himself, headache returning in full as he retreats back into his haven of bedding. </p><p>    A gasp and fizzling noise just outside his bedroom door tells him she’s gone. Probably for a while as she hadn’t been resting, and she went from knocking on to phasing through his door with very little transition time. He would be free of her for a few precious days, and he really didn’t want to waste one of them bedridden but he can’t open his eyes against the sunlight pouring in through his window. He can’t convince his arms to throw the blanket off. He can’t make his legs swing over the edge of the bed. He can’t, he can’t he <em> can’t- </em></p><p>    It’s the dryness in his mouth and throat and the clammy wet of his blankets that tell him he’s slept the day away before the dark night sky confirms it. Gerard groans and fishes around for where his water bottle stands on the bedside table. He finds it, half empty, and draws it back into his cave of pillows, propping himself up just enough to drain it in one long pull. With his throat somewhat eased he takes stock of the headache. Still present, but receded enough that he can <em> think </em> again at least. For now that would have to be enough. He’d already wasted enough of this time, <em> his </em> time, well his as much as any portion of his life could well and truly belong to him, free of Mary. </p><p>    He snaps his aching joints back into their proper places and drags himself out of bed. The duffle bag he keeps packed in the closet is far too heavy on his screaming shoulder and neck but he doesn’t care. If the pain didn’t fuck up his head he could ignore it. Besides he needed the bag, and he <em> needed </em>to be gone. Long gone and far away before she got back. He had a few days, a few days before she’d start to track him down, and with a headstart like that he could be miles and countries and oceans away if he really tried. He wasn’t sure he had it in him to really try this time, especially since it never seemed to matter how far he fled. She would always be there, waiting to yank him out of bed and back to her damn book hunt. </p><p>    Lost in his own thoughts Gerard stumbles down the stairs, forgetting to lean his weight on outsides of his flat, unsupportive, useless feet and making his knees twist inward and scream at the distortion with every step. He curses at his legs, and at the stairs, and for a moment he thinks he hates them almost as much as Mary. But, no. That would be unfair to the stairs, they didn’t ask to be built this way, engineered specifically to hurt him and bend him out of shape. His mother on the other hand, well he couldn’t be sure of the same. Besides, the stairs limited their torture to his knees and ankles, with Mary anything was fair game.</p><p>    He’d slept in his clothes and compression socks, so it was just a matter of throwing on his shoes and rooting around for his spare abdominal binder in his bug-out-bag. He was halfway through the store with his hand in the duffle when something caught the corner of his eye like a fishhook. It reeled his head around to look at the checkout counter of Pinhole Books, where his eyes fell on the book. His <em> mother’s book! </em> It sat there on the counter, as innocuous as it was all consuming, and Gerard felt something completely unrelated to his posture bloom and swell in his chest.</p><p>    He remembers an offer made to him. An old woman he met in passing. But she seemed to know him and he felt like he somehow knew her. She’s hard around some of the same edges as his mother, but honest. Honest and contained, her goals didn’t care about his pain, so they didn’t necessitate the undo creation of it like so many of his mother’s did. And she saw him. She looked him over and made him an offer that sounded like a promise. With so few things promised to him he still held tight to that offer, grabbed it and breathed in the words so he could keep them safe behind his ribs, the one place his mother probably couldn’t reach them. It must be them churning out choking gouts of pressing hope into his lungs. He didn’t want to dare hope, he’d learned long ago that hope was a trapdoor into grief, and surely even the entities knew he had enough of that.</p><p>    But still, Mary never left <em> the book </em> out, was this a slip up? A trap? Would she pop out of it like the world's worst jack in the box to scold and beat him for even daring to think he could be free of her? Did it matter? He was a sucker and his breaths were rapid with the building of hope inside his chest that felt so terribly much like panic. It was a chance, right? He had to try, right? He’d been through so much worse than one of her tirades, any chance at freedom no matter how rigged the odds looked was worth taking, <em> right? </em> He <em> knew </em> he was right, knew the answer to the spinning questions in his spinning head was yes. So Gerard took the book, and took his leave from his pinhole prison, resolving that even if he was trading one oculus for another it couldn’t possibly be worse.</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>me: *sleeps through all of monday because of a headache*<br/>me: *wakes up on tuesday and immediately projects on gerry.*<br/>me: can i get a yell hEAH!!</p></blockquote></div></div>
</body>
</html>